Subj : Re: What if?
To   : alt.spam,comp.os.linux
From : Minderbinder
Date : Mon Jul 12 2004 02:09 am

On Sun, 11 Jul 2004 17:01:16 -0400, Sweet Anise wrote:

>   What if everyone with broadband decided to do exactly
> what the spammers asked?  That is, download their index pages?  Since the
> spammers ask over and over, the hypothetical situation might possibly call
> for downloading these pages over and over.
> 
>   What if everyone who received a spam from, for instance,
> lender-home.com (and I use this in the example simply because it's the
> most recent one that circumvented my spam filters) activated a little
> script to grab the page a thousand or a few thousand times?
> 

If you give them page hits, you give them MORE incentive to continue
spammming. You might even help them to secure new advertising deals
and raise their advertising revenue.

If enough people did as you suggest, you might get lucky and render their
server unavailable by swamping it (a distributed denial-of-service attack
caused by excessive page requests, also known as the "slashdot effect").
If you're doing a DDoS attack, why bother retrieving the page and wasting
your bandwith? All you need to do is initiate enough (empty) connections
to tie up the server (SYN flood). This would require fewer attacking hosts
to be effective.

Minderbinder.

.